That’s the Wordle

By Colin Udall

A screenshot is taken from “Wordle,” by Colin Udall.

“Wordle,” an online word game, seems to be everywhere this year. Tik-Tok and Instagram accounts made specifically for the game “Wordle” have become unusually popular. The unusuality in “Wordle’s” recent success in social media is that the game is significantly simple. In “Wordle,” the player begins with six empty rows to guess a five-letter word, the “Wordle.” The beginning word can be anything but choose carefully as it may give you hints as to what the word is. After guessing, yellow highlighted letters are somewhere in the “Wordle,” but not where the player placed them, and green highlighted letters are in the “Wordle” and in the correct position. 

What “Wordle” does, which made it so popular in the first place, is giving its players only one “Wordle” every day. That is, one game daily, for everyone. It may seem like a restrictive feature but the genius here is that the “Wordle” is the same word for everyone. What the creators of this word game have done is allow its players to collectively share what they feel about the word each day. With varying difficulty in words, players message their friends their frustrations or easement.

“Wordle” spin-off games and applications exist and are somewhat common. However, the game’s popularity does not exist largely on its game-style, and these spin-offs never match the original “Wordle’s” growing player base. A player base who many are not regularly interested in word games. 

The daily “Wordle” reminisces of the daily crossword in the newspaper, except far more plain, and with the provided link of the internet. It, perhaps, sheds a light on an intricacy of human nature, one in which people love more to share their common experiences with each other more so than they enjoy experiencing. Otherwise, “Wordle” is such an absurdly simple game that just happens to strike a chord with millions of people.